The Client
Fintecs facilitated the change of management of the main accounting system for
a major International Bank with offices based in European cities that
include London, Paris, Amsterdam, Geneva, and Zurich.

Project Summary
Management of a critically important software development team, responsible
for the bank’s main accounting system, was changing hands. A method had to
be developed to transfer the outgoing manager’s expert knowledge and
experience to the incoming manager rapidly and efficiently in order to ensure
an effective and glitch-free hand-over.

The ChallengeThe bank’s software development team is responsible for the highly
critical main accounting system. This system is crucial to the bank’s
operations in several different ways. Every single banking transaction that
the bank performs passes through this software ‘universe’ which is also
used for the vitally important function of statutory reporting. The system
also provides financial consolidation information to the bank’s main board
through its built-in executive information system. The system is thus the
central accounting function of the bank – the core of its business.

The manager in charge of the software development team – a key role - was
leaving the team and moving elsewhere in the bank while a new manager was
brought in to replace him. The challenge of the project was to facilitate this
change by transferring knowledge from the departing manager to the arriving
manager and from the existing team members to the new manager.

The existing system was, of course, well documented in thousands of
pages of text. But the very quantity of information meant that the
essential knowledge it contained was inaccessible. The system was so large
and its various elements so complex that knowledge was fragmented between
team members. Inevitably, some parts of the system remained undocumented
and the information existed only inside team member’s heads. Most
challenging of all was that, because of the size and complexity of the
system, there was no global view.

Fintecs Solution
Working together with the bank’s team, Fintecs devised an innovative
method of documenting the bank’s highly complex central accounting system by
means of visual process mapping.

According to Tony Gratton, managing director of Fintecs, who headed the
consulting project, ‘It was clear to everyone from the outset that the
knowledge transfer process was going to involve some new kind of documentation
process – but what kind, exactly? The existing manager and his team held in
their heads the equivalent of thousands of pages of text. How could an
incoming manager hope to take on board this vast ocean of data in only the
short time available?’

‘The solution we arrived at was, in effect, to map visually the knowledge
that people held in the heads. We went through a re-iterative process of
sitting around the table and talking to people about their functions, about
their role in the development team and about the part of the systems that they
worked on. As a result of these de-briefings we recorded the information
visually, and gave them in return that same information in the form of a
printed map which they could put on the office wall and live with -- work with
it, write on it -- and then repeat the process, gradually refining and
expanding the map.’

Fintecs also introduced two other important principles into the visual
mapping process. The first was to use a ‘top-down’ approach, which
starts with the big picture, and with strategic elements of the system and
then gradually drills down into more and more detailed level in subsequent
iterations. The second technique was to consider elements of the system in
terms of their similarities and their differences.

Benefits
The project achieved its overall objective very successfully and enabled
the arriving manger to take up his post and absorb the necessary complex
detail more rapidly than he would otherwise.

But the project also had further, unexpected benefits. The re-iterative
mapping process enabled the team to rediscover their own universe. Horizontal
links between processes that were normally difficult to see were exposed and
mapped. Knowledge was successfully transferred between generations of
management but knowledge was also transferred between team members. The map
was used by the team to structure discussions with their clients – the end
user departments inside the bank. Workgroup discussions became more effective
because the map provided instant context. And, most important of all, the
visual map provided a global view pf the bank’s system for the first time.

Says Tony Gratton, ‘The project made the team appreciate horizontal links
across business units and across different accounting functions that they hadn’t
fully appreciated before – they knew they were there, but hadn’t realised
the importance of them. That was an important step because often people tend
to think just in terms of vertical processes and the horizontal links tend to
get missed.’

‘As well as the arriving manager, the existing team actually got an awful
lot out of it because one of the things that we found as we spoke to team
members was that the they tended to specialise in a particular area of the
domain and weren’t fully aware of what else was going on outside their area
of specialisation -- where they fitted into the whole process and where they
added value.’

‘Producing the map and putting it up on the wall enabled them to have an
internal knowledge transfer between themselves which was an unintended but
very beneficial side effect. And in fact the team started using the document
regularly for internal meetings. We then found that the team was starting to
use the map in conjunction with their clients – it became a tool for
communications with the end user departments, which again was completely
unexpected. But once they’d seen it, everyone wanted a map and we ended up
producing copies which went out to all the user departments.’

The project was groundbreaking in many ways and it’s lessons
far-reaching. Says Tony Gratton, ‘For me, the most interesting insight to
come out of this assignment is that people think that technology is all about
technology, but this project proved that technology is all about people.’

About Fintecs
Founded in 2001, Fintecs is a Banking IT consultancy that combines
in-depth expertise in Banking and the Financial industry with a unique
approach to the visual documentation of systems, business processes and
people.

The Fintecs visual approach to IT documentation has been developed in
association with one of Europe’s leading banks. It is designed to help
financial institutions of all kinds to rediscover the value of their hardware
and software assets and to:-

· Transfer vital knowledge among staff
· Match IT systems more closely to the needs of Business
· Understand fully how business processes interact
· Plan future systems with confidence

Fintecs draws on a wealth of experience with all kinds of financial
institutions from private banking to trust administration including
specialities such as asset management for private and institutional clients.
Fintecs has carried out consultancy projects in countries throughout Europe.
Staff are English-French bilingual and have extensive experience of the Swiss
banking system.

Fintecs consultancy work has included business process analysis from
front-office to back, data flows, databases and a wide range of software
applications, with extensive experience of Project Management, Project
Implementation, Systems Integration, and Systems Replacement.